APIs for Accelerating Vision and Inferencing: an Industry Overview of Options and Trade-offs

Ramesh Raskar is founder of the Camera Culture research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab and associate professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT. Raskar is the co-inventor of radical imaging solutions including femto-photography, an ultra-fast imaging camera that can see around corners, low-cost eye-care solutions for the developing world and a camera that allows users to read pages of a book without opening the cover. He is a pioneer in the fields of imaging, computer vision and machine learning. Raskar’s focus is on building interfaces between social systems and cyber-physical systems. These interfaces span research in physical (e.g., sensors, health-tech), digital (e.g., tools to enable keeping data private in distributed machine learning applications) and global (e.g., geomaps, autonomous mobility) domains. Recent inventions by Raskar’s team include transient imaging to look around a corner, a next-generation CAT-scan machine, imperceptible markers for motion capture, long-distance barcodes, touch + hover 3D interaction displays and new theoretical models to augment light fields to represent wave phenomena. Raskar has dedicated his career to linking the best of the academic and entrepreneurial worlds with young engineers, igniting a passion for impact inventing. Raskar seeks to catalyze change on a massive scale by launching platforms that empower inventors to create solutions to improve lives globally. Raskar has received the Lemelson Award, ACM SIGGRAPH Achievement Award, DARPA Young Faculty Award, Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, TR100 Award from MIT Technology Review and Global Indus Technovator Award. He has worked on special research projects at Google [X] and Facebook and co-founded and advised several companies. He holds more than 80 US patents.